Monopoly: How the Original Game Was Made to Condemn Monopolies & the Abuses of Capitalism

in Economics, History | February 16th, 2015

The great cap­i­tal­ist game of Monop­oly was first mar­ket­ed by Park­er Broth­ers back in Feb­ru­ary 1935, right in the mid­dle of the Great Depres­sion. Even dur­ing hard times, Amer­i­cans could still imag­ine amass­ing a for­tune and secur­ing a monop­oly on the real estate mar­ket. When it comes to mak­ing mon­ey, Amer­i­cans nev­er run out of opti­mism and hope.

Monop­oly did­n’t real­ly begin, how­ev­er, in 1935. And if you trace back the ori­gins of the game, you’ll encounter an iron­ic, curi­ous tale. The sto­ry goes like this: Eliz­a­beth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips (1866–1948), a dis­ci­ple of the pro­gres­sive era econ­o­mist Hen­ry George, cre­at­ed the pro­to­type for Monop­oly in 1903. And she did so with the goal of illus­trat­ing the prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with con­cen­trat­ing land in pri­vate monop­o­lies.

As Mary Pilon, the author of the new book The Monop­o­lists: Obses­sion, Fury, and the Scan­dal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, recent­ly explained in The New York Times, the orig­i­nal game — The Landlord’s Game — came with two sets of rules: “an anti-monop­o­list set in which all were reward­ed when wealth was cre­at­ed, and a monop­o­list set in which the goal was to cre­ate monop­o­lies and crush oppo­nents.” Phillips’ approach, Pilon adds, “was a teach­ing tool meant to demon­strate that the first set of rules was moral­ly supe­ri­or.” In oth­er words, the orig­i­nal game of Monop­oly was cre­at­ed as a cri­tique of monop­o­lies — some­thing the trust- and monop­oly-bust­ing pres­i­dent, Theodore Roo­sevelt, could relate to.

Patent­ed in 1904 and self-pub­lished in 1906, The Land­lord’s Game fea­tured “play mon­ey and deeds and prop­er­ties that could be bought and sold. Play­ers bor­rowed mon­ey, either from the bank or from each oth­er, and they had to pay tax­es,” Pilon writes in her new book.

The Landlord’s Game also had the look & feel of the game the Park­er Broth­ers would even­tu­al­ly bas­tardize and make famous. Above, you can see an image from the patent Philips filed in 1904 (top), and anoth­er image from the mar­ket­ed game.

Magie Philips nev­er got cred­it or resid­u­als from the Park­er Broth­ers’ game. Instead, a fel­low named Charles Dar­row came along and draft­ed his own ver­sion of the game, tweaked the design, called it Monop­oly (see the ear­li­est ver­sion here), slapped a copy­right on the pack­ag­ing with his name, and then sold the game to Park­er Broth­ers for a report­ed $7,000, plus resid­u­als. He even­tu­al­ly made mil­lions.

As they like to say in the US, it’s just busi­ness.

For more on the ori­gins of Monop­oly, read Mary Pilon’s piece in The Times.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hen­ry Rollins: Edu­ca­tion is the Cure to “Dis­as­ter Cap­i­tal­ism”

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mas­ter­piece Stalk­er Gets Adapt­ed into a Video Game

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Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

in History, Music | February 10th, 2015

Back in July of last year, we brought you a tran­scrip­tion and a cou­ple of audio inter­pre­ta­tions of the old­est known song in the world, dis­cov­ered in the ancient Syr­i­an city of Ugar­it and dat­ing back to the 14th cen­tu­ry B.C.E.. Like­ly per­formed on an instru­ment resem­bling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hur­ri­an Cult Song” or “Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6” sounds oth­er­world­ly to our ears, although mod­ern-day musi­col­o­gists can only guess at the song’s tem­po and rhythm.

When we reach even fur­ther back in time, long before the advent of sys­tems of writ­ing, we are com­plete­ly at a loss as to the forms of music pre­his­toric humans might have pre­ferred. But we do know that music was like­ly a part of their every­day lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evi­dence for the kinds of instru­ments they played. In 2008, arche­ol­o­gists dis­cov­ered frag­ments of flutes carved from vul­ture and mam­moth bones at a Stone Age cave site in south­ern Ger­many called Hohle Fels. These instru­ments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may sup­plant ear­li­er find­ings of flutes at a near­by site dat­ing back 35,000 years.

bone flute

Image via the The Archae­ol­o­gy News Net­work

The flutes are metic­u­lous­ly craft­ed, reports Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly the mam­moth bone flute, which would have been “espe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing to make.” At the time of their dis­cov­ery, researchers spec­u­lat­ed that the flutes “may have been one of the cul­tur­al accom­plish­ments that gave the first Euro­pean mod­ern-human (Homo sapi­ens) set­tlers an advan­tage over their now extinct Nean­derthal-human (Homo nean­derthalis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowl­edge about Nean­derthals, includ­ing new evi­dence of inter­breed­ing with Homo Sapi­ens, these con­clu­sions may have to be revised.

It is per­haps pos­si­ble that the much-under­es­ti­mat­ed Nean­derthals made their own flutes. Or so a 1995 dis­cov­ery of a flute made from a cave bear femur might sug­gest. Found by arche­ol­o­gist Ivan Turk in a Nean­derthal camp­site at Div­je Babe in north­west­ern Slove­nia, this instru­ment (above) is esti­mat­ed to be over 43,000 years old and per­haps as much as 80,000 years old. Accord­ing to musi­col­o­gist Bob Fink, the flute’s four fin­ger holes match four notes of a dia­ton­ic (Do, Re, Mi…) scale. “Unless we deny it is a flute at all,” Fink argues, the notes of the flute “are inescapably dia­ton­ic and will sound like a near-per­fect fit with­in ANY kind of stan­dard dia­ton­ic scale, mod­ern or antique.” To demon­strate the point, the cura­tor of the Sloven­ian Nation­al Muse­um had a clay repli­ca of the flute made. You can hear it played at the top of the post by Sloven­ian musi­cian Ljuben Dimkaros­ki.

The pre­his­toric instru­ment does indeed pro­duce the whole and half tones of the dia­ton­ic scale, so com­plete­ly, in fact, that Dimkaros­ki is able to play frag­ments of sev­er­al com­po­si­tions by Beethoven, Ver­di, Rav­el, Dvořák, and oth­ers, as well as some free impro­vi­sa­tions “mock­ing ani­mal voic­es.” The video’s Youtube page explains his choice of music as “a pot­pour­ri of frag­ments from com­po­si­tions of var­i­ous authors,” select­ed “to show the capa­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment, tonal range, stac­ca­to, lega­to, glis­san­do….” (Dimkaros­ki claims to have fig­ured out how to play the instru­ment in a dream.) Although arche­ol­o­gists have hot­ly dis­put­ed whether or not the flute is actu­al­ly the work of Nean­derthals, as Turk sug­gest­ed, should it be so, the find­ing would con­tra­dict claims that the close human rel­a­tives “left no firm evi­dence of hav­ing been musi­cal.” But what­ev­er its ori­gin, it seems cer­tain­ly to be a hominid arti­fact—not the work of preda­tors—and a key to unlock­ing the pre­his­to­ry of musi­cal expres­sion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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19th Century Maps Visualize Measles in America Before the Miracle of Vaccines

in Health, History, Science | February 5th, 2015

2MeaslesMap

This week, Rebec­ca Onion’s always inter­est­ing blog on Slate fea­tures his­tor­i­cal maps that illus­trate the toll measles took on Amer­i­ca before the advent of vac­cines. The map above brings you back to 1890, when measles-relat­ed deaths were con­cen­trat­ed in the South and the Mid­west. That year, accord­ing to the U.S. cen­sus, 8,666 peo­ple died from the dis­ease. Fast for­ward to the peri­od mov­ing from 1912 to 1916, and you’ll find that there were 53,00 measles-relat­ed deaths in the US.

Amer­i­ca con­tin­ued to strug­gle with the dis­ease, until 1962, when sci­en­tists mer­ci­ful­ly invent­ed a vac­cine, and the rate of measles infec­tions and deaths began to plum­met. The authors of “Measles Elim­i­na­tion in the Unit­ed States,” pub­lished in The Jour­nal of Infec­tious Dis­eases (2004), note that “Since 1997, the report­ed annu­al inci­dence [of measles] has been <1 case/1 mil­lion pop­u­la­tion”  — mean­ing that the dis­ease had been pret­ty much erad­i­cat­ed in the US. But not else­where. The authors go on to warn, “Measles is the great­est vac­cine-pre­ventable killer of chil­dren in the world today and the eighth lead­ing cause of death among per­sons of all ages world­wide.”  It does­n’t take much to deduce that if we dis­miss the sci­ence that has served us so well, we could see dread­ful­ly col­ored maps all over again. Except this time the dark orange will like­ly be con­cen­trat­ed on the left coast.

Find more his­tor­i­cal maps on Slate.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Roald Dahl, Who Lost His Daugh­ter to Measles, Writes a Heart­break­ing Let­ter about Vac­ci­na­tions

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Romantic Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge & Robert Southey Write About Their Experiments with Laughing Gas (1799)

in History, Literature, Science | February 5th, 2015

800px-Laughing_gas_Rumford_Davy

A hun­dred years before Sig­mund Freud used him­self as a test sub­ject for his exper­i­ments with cocaine, anoth­er sci­en­tist, Humphry Davy, Eng­lish chemist and future pres­i­dent of the Roy­al Soci­ety, began “a very rad­i­cal bout of self exper­i­men­ta­tion to deter­mine the effects of” anoth­er drug—nitrous oxide, bet­ter known as “laugh­ing gas.” Davy’s find­ings — Research­es, Chem­i­cal and Philo­soph­i­cal Chiefly Con­cern­ing Nitrous Oxide, or Diphlo­gis­ti­cat­ed Nitrous Air, And Its Res­pi­ra­tion By Humphry Davy—pub­lished in 1800, come to us via The Pub­lic Domain Review, who describe the 1799 exper­i­ments thus:

With his assis­tant Dr. Kinglake, he would heat crys­tals of ammo­ni­um nitrate, col­lect the gas released in a green oiled-silk bag, pass it through water vapour to remove impu­ri­ties and then inhale it through a mouth­piece. The effects were superb. Of these first exper­i­ments he described gid­di­ness, flushed cheeks, intense plea­sure, and “sub­lime emo­tion con­nect­ed with high­ly vivid ideas.”

Though we don’t typ­i­cal­ly think of nitrous oxide as an addic­tive sub­stance, like Freud’s exper­i­ments, Davy’s pro­gressed rapid­ly from curios­i­ty to recre­ation: “He began to take the gas out­side of lab­o­ra­to­ry con­di­tions, return­ing alone for soli­tary ses­sions in the dark, inhal­ing huge amounts, ‘occu­pied only by an ide­al exis­tence,’ and also after drink­ing in the evening.” For­tu­nate­ly for us, how­ev­er, also like Freud, Davy “con­tin­ued to be metic­u­lous in his sci­en­tif­ic records through­out.” Even­tu­al­ly, the twen­ty-year-old Davy con­struct­ed an “air-tight breath­ing box.” Seal­ing him­self inside, writes Mike Jay, Davy had Dr. Kinglake “release twen­ty quarts of nitrous oxide every five min­utes for as long as he could retain con­scious­ness.”

Also, like Freud’s use of cocaine, Davy’s research briefly led to a fad­dish recre­ation­al use of the drug, well into the ear­ly part of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, as you can see in the car­i­ca­tures at the top and below, from 1830 and 1829, respec­tive­ly. But despite what these humor­ous images sug­gest, “laugh­ing gas” became known not only as a par­ty drug, but also as a means of achiev­ing height­ened states of con­scious­ness con­ducive to philo­soph­i­cal reflec­tion and poet­ic cre­ation (hence the “Philo­soph­i­cal” ref­er­ence in the title of Davy’s research). Dur­ing his own expe­ri­ences “under the influ­ence of the largest does of nitrous oxide any­one had ever tak­en,” Davy “’lost all con­nec­tion with exter­nal things,’ and entered a self-envelop­ing realm of the sens­es,” writes Jay, find­ing him­self “‘in a world of new­ly con­nect­ed and mod­i­fied ideas,’ where he could the­o­rise with­out lim­its and make new dis­cov­er­ies at will.”

The appeal of this state to a sci­en­tist may be obvi­ous, and to a poet even more so. Davy’s friend Robert Southey, the future Poet Lau­re­ate, became “as effu­sive” as Davy after tak­ing the gas, exclaim­ing, “the atmos­phere of the high­est of all pos­si­ble heav­ens must be com­posed of this gas.” In addi­tion to Southey, Davy’s “free­wheel­ing pro­gram of con­scious­ness expan­sion… co-opt­ed some of the most remark­able fig­ures of his day”—including Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, who is already well-known for find­ing some of his poet­ic inspi­ra­tion under the influ­ence of opi­um. Coleridge at the time had just pub­lished to great acclaim The Lyri­cal Bal­lads with William Wordsworth and had returned from a brief sojourn in Ger­many, where he had become heav­i­ly influ­enced by the Ger­man Ide­al­ist phi­los­o­phy of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling.

Laughing Gas--Poetry

Coleridge, who was “cap­ti­vat­ed by the young chemist” Davy, described his expe­ri­ence of tak­ing nitrous oxide for the first time in very pre­cise terms, avoid­ing the “extrav­a­gant metaphors” oth­ers tend­ed to rely on. He recalled the sen­sa­tions as resem­bling “that which I remem­ber once to have expe­ri­enced after return­ing from the snow into a warm room,” and, in a lat­er tri­al, said he was “more vio­lent­ly act­ed upon” and that “towards the last I could not avoid, nor felt any wish to avoid, beat­ing the ground with my feet; and after the mouth­piece was removed, I remained for a few sec­onds motion­less, in great ecsta­cy.” Under the influ­ence of both nitrous oxide and philo­soph­i­cal meta­physics, Coleridge had come to believe “the mate­r­i­al world only an illu­sion pro­ject­ed by” the mind.

Davy, who ful­ly endorsed this view, claim­ing “noth­ing exists but thoughts,” brought his “chaot­ic mélange of hedo­nism, hero­ism, poet­ry and phi­los­o­phy” to heel in the “coher­ent and pow­er­ful” 580-page mono­graph above, which makes the case for laugh­ing gas’s sci­en­tif­ic and poet­ic worth. The report, writes Jay, com­bines “two mutu­al­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble languages—organic chem­istry and sub­jec­tive experience—to cre­ate a ground­break­ing hybrid, a poet­ic sci­ence.” Like Freud’s use of cocaine or Tim­o­thy Leary’s exper­i­ments with LSD decades lat­er, Davy’s exper­i­ments fur­ther demon­strate, per­haps, that the few times the sci­ences, phi­los­o­phy, and poet­ry com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er, it’s gen­er­al­ly under the influ­ence of mind-alter­ing sub­stances.

For more on Davy and nine­teenth cen­tu­ry England’s fas­ci­na­tion with laugh­ing gas, see Mike Jay’s Pub­lic Domain Review essay here and read this New York Review of Books arti­cle on his book-length treat­ment of the sub­ject, The Atmos­phere of Heav­en: The Unnat­ur­al Exper­i­ments of Dr. Bed­does and His Sons of Genius.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

Woman Takes LSD in 1956: “I’ve Nev­er Seen Such Infi­nite Beau­ty in All My Life,” “I Wish I Could Talk in Tech­ni­col­or”

Beyond Tim­o­thy Leary: 2002 Film Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Carl Sagan Extols the Virtues of Cannabis (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Auschwitz Captured in Haunting Drone Footage (and a New Short Film by Steven Spielberg & Meryl Streep)

in History | February 1st, 2015

Drones can give us an extra­or­di­nary view of cities still in their prime — cities like Los Ange­les, New York, Lon­don, Bangkok & Mex­i­co City. They can also give us a rare glimpse of places no longer inhab­it­ed, places qui­et­ed by the unspeak­able. We’ve shown you a drone’s-eye view of Cher­nobyl. This week, it’s Auschwitz. Shot by the BBC, this sober­ing footage car­ries us over the mas­sive Nazi con­cen­tra­tion, built in South­ern Poland, where 1.1 mil­lion peo­ple died dur­ing World War II, most of them (90%) Euro­pean Jews. Many died in the gas cham­bers. Oth­ers of star­va­tion, forced labor, infec­tious dis­eases, and sadis­tic med­ical exper­i­ments.

On this web­site, you can also watch a new­ly-released short doc­u­men­tary on Auschwitz. Pro­duced by Steven Spiel­berg and nar­rat­ed by Meryl Streep, it pre­miered last week before 300 Holo­caust sur­vivors in Auschwitz, help­ing to com­mem­o­rate the 70th anniver­sary of the lib­er­a­tion of the camp.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

How Alice Herz-Som­mer, the Old­est Holo­caust Sur­vivor, Sur­vived the Hor­rif­ic Ordeal with Music

Mem­o­ry of the Camps (1985): The Holo­caust Doc­u­men­tary that Trau­ma­tized Alfred Hitch­cock, and Remained Unseen for 40 Years

The Touch­ing Moment When Nicholas Win­ton Met the Chil­dren He Saved Dur­ing the Holo­caust

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The Little Albert Experiment: The Perverse 1920 Study That Made a Baby Afraid of Santa Claus & Bunnies

in History, Psychology, Science | January 29th, 2015

The field of psy­chol­o­gy is very dif­fer­ent than it used to be. Nowa­days, the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion has a code of con­duct for exper­i­ments that ensures a subject’s con­fi­den­tial­i­ty, con­sent and gen­er­al men­tal well being. In the old days, it was­n’t the case.

Back then, you could, for instance, con sub­jects into think­ing that they were elec­tro­cut­ing a man to death, as they did in the infa­mous 1961 Mil­gram exper­i­ment, which left peo­ple trau­ma­tized and hum­bled in the knowl­edge that deep down they are lit­tle more than weak-willed pup­pets in the face of author­i­ty. You could also try to turn a group of unsus­pect­ing orphans into stut­ter­ers by method­i­cal­ly under­min­ing their self-esteem as the folks who ran the apt­ly named Mon­ster Study of 1939 tried to do. But, if you real­ly want to get into the swamp of moral dubi­ous­ness, look no fur­ther than the Lit­tle Albert exper­i­ments, which trau­ma­tized a baby into hat­ing dogs, San­ta Claus and all things fuzzy.

Albert-and-rabbit-1024x718

In 1920, Johns Hop­kins pro­fes­sor John B. Wat­son was fas­ci­nat­ed with Ivan Pavlov’s research on con­di­tioned stim­u­lus. Pavlov famous­ly rang a bell every time he fed his dogs. At first the food caused the dogs to sali­vate, but after a spell of pair­ing the bell with din­ner, the dogs would even­tu­al­ly sali­vate at just the sound of the bell. That’s called a con­di­tioned response. Wat­son want­ed to see if he could cre­ate a con­di­tioned response in a baby.

Enter 9‑month old Albert B., AKA Lit­tle Albert. At the begin­ning of the exper­i­ment, Albert was pre­sent­ed with a white rat, a dog, a white rab­bit, and a mask of San­ta Claus among oth­er things. The lad was unafraid of every­thing and was, in fact, real­ly tak­en with the rat. Then every time the baby touched the ani­mals, sci­en­tists struck a met­al bar behind him, cre­at­ing a star­tling­ly loud bang. The sound freaked out the child and soon, like Pavlov’s dogs, Lit­tle Albert grew ter­ri­fied of the rat and the mask of San­ta and even a fur coat. The par­tic­u­lar­ly messed up thing about the exper­i­ment was that Wat­son didn’t even both to reverse the psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma he inflict­ed.

Little-albert

What hap­pened to poor baby Albert is hard to say, in part because no one is real­ly sure of the child’s true iden­ti­ty. He might have been Dou­glas Mer­ritte, as psy­chol­o­gists Hall P. Beck and Shar­man Levin­son argued in 2009. If that’s the case, then the child died at the age of 6 in 1925 of hydro­cephalus. Or he might have been William Albert Barg­er, as Russ Pow­ell and Nan­cy Dig­don argued in 2012. He passed away in 2007 at the age of 87. He report­ed­ly had a life­long aver­sion to dogs, though it can­not be deter­mined if it was a last­ing effect of the exper­i­ment.

Lat­er in life, Wat­son left aca­d­e­mics for adver­tis­ing.

You can watch a video of the exper­i­ment above.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

How To Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist: A Free Online Course from Stan­ford

Watch Footage from the Psy­chol­o­gy Exper­i­ment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obe­di­ence Study (1961)

Her­mann Rorschach’s Orig­i­nal Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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Hear Gandhi’s Famous Speech on the Existence of God (1931)

in History | January 28th, 2015

A per­fect sym­bol of the mech­a­nisms of British rule over India, the Salt Acts pro­hib­it­ed Indi­ans from access and trade of their own resources, forc­ing them to buy salt from British monop­o­lies, who taxed the min­er­al heav­i­ly. In 1930, in one of the defin­ing acts of his Satya­gra­ha move­ment, Mohan­das Gand­hi decid­ed to defy the Salt Act with a very grand gesture—a march, with thou­sands of his sup­port­ers, over a dis­tance of over 200 miles, to the Ara­bi­an Sea. Once there, fol­low­ing Gandhi’s lead, the crowd pro­ceed­ed to col­lect sea salt, prompt­ing British colo­nial police to arrest over 60,000 peo­ple, includ­ing Gand­hi him­self.

The 1930 action, the first orga­nized act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence after the Indi­an Nation­al Con­gress’ dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence, got the atten­tion of the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, who had been direct­ing harsh repres­sive mea­sures against the grow­ing inde­pen­dence move­ment, and in Jan­u­ary of 1931, after his release, Gand­hi and Irwin signed a pact. Gand­hi agreed to end the move­ment; Irwin agreed to allow the Indi­ans to make their own salt, and the Indi­ans would have an equal role in nego­ti­at­ing India’s future. British offi­cials were out­raged and dis­gust­ed. Win­ston Churchill, for exam­ple, staunch­ly opposed to inde­pen­dence, called the meet­ing of the two lead­ers a “nau­se­at­ing and humil­i­at­ing spec­ta­cle,” say­ing “Gand­hi-ism and every­thing it stands for will have to be grap­pled with and crushed.” (Churchill favored let­ting Gand­hi die if he went on hunger strike.)

The terms of the pact, of course, did not hold, and the move­ment would con­tin­ue until even­tu­al inde­pen­dence in 1947. But Gand­hi had not only suc­ceed­ed in incur­ring the wrath of the British colo­nial­ists; he had also won many sup­port­ers in Eng­land. One of them, Muriel Lester, invit­ed the Indi­an leader to stay with her in Lon­don at a com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter she had found­ed called Kings­ley Hall. “He enjoyed his stay here,” says the cur­rent Kings­ley Hall man­ag­er David Bak­er, “and it was wise because if he had stayed in the West End the press would have lam­pooned him. He wouldn’t have had a life, but here he was left alone and walked around in the streets. He want­ed to stay with the peo­ple that he lived with in India, i.e. the poor.” How­ev­er, Gand­hi wasn’t total­ly ignored by the press. While at Kings­ley, he deliv­ered a short speech, which you can hear above, and the BBC was there to record it.

In the speech, Gand­hi says absolute­ly noth­ing about Indi­an inde­pen­dence, British oppres­sion, or the aims and tac­tics of the move­ment. He says noth­ing at all about pol­i­tics or any world­ly affairs what­so­ev­er. Instead, he lec­tures on the exis­tence of God, “an inde­fin­able mys­te­ri­ous pow­er that per­vades every­thing,” and which “defies all proof.” Gand­hi tes­ti­fies to “an unal­ter­able law gov­ern­ing every­thing and every being that exists or lives,” though he also con­fess­es “that I have no argu­ment to con­vince through rea­son.” Instead relies on analo­gies, on things he “dim­ly per­ceives,” on the “mar­velous research­es of [Indi­an engi­neer and sci­en­tist] Sir J.C. Bose,” and on “the expe­ri­ences of an unbro­ken line of prophets and sages in all coun­tries and climes.” It’s not a speech like­ly to per­suade any­one who isn’t already some sort of a believ­er, I think, but it’s of much inter­est to any­one inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of Indi­an inde­pen­dence and in Gandhi’s life and mes­sage.

You can read the full text of the speech here, and see footage of Kings­ley Hall and a filmed inter­view with Muriel Lester, dis­cussing Gandhi’s stay, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mahat­ma Gandhi’s List of the 7 Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Liv­ing the Bad Life

Mahat­ma Gand­hi Talks (in First Record­ed Video)

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Public Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use

in Art, Creativity, Film, History, Photography | January 21st, 2015

Sure, we love the inter­net for how it makes freely avail­able so many cul­tur­al arti­facts. And sure, we also love the inter­net for how it allows us to dis­sem­i­nate our own work. But the inter­net gets the most inter­est­ing, I would sub­mit, when it makes freely avail­able cul­tur­al arti­facts with the express pur­pose of let­ting cre­ators use them in their own work — which we then all get to expe­ri­ence through the inter­net. The new Pub­lic Domain Project will soon become an impor­tant resource for many such cre­ators, offer­ing as it does “thou­sands of his­toric media files for your cre­ative projects, com­plete­ly free and made avail­able by Pond5,” an enti­ty that brands itself as “the world’s most vibrant mar­ket­place for cre­ativ­i­ty.”

trip to the moon public domain

So what can you find to use in the Pub­lic Domain Project? As of this writ­ing, it offers 9715 pieces of footage, 473 audio files, 64,535 images, and 121 3D mod­els. “The project includes dig­i­tal mod­els of NASA tools and satel­lites, Georges Méliès’ 1902 film, A Trip To The Moon, speech­es by polit­i­cal fig­ures like Win­ston Churchill and Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., record­ings of per­for­mances from com­posers like Beethoven, and a laid-back pic­ture of Pres­i­dent Oba­ma play­ing pool,” says a post at The Cre­ators Project explain­ing the site’s back­ground.

In the Pub­lic Domain Pro­jec­t’s expand­ing archives you will also find clips of every­thing, from rock­et launch­es to film of old New York to very, very ear­ly cat videos, to, of course, mush­room clouds. I imag­ine that some future Chris Mark­er could make cre­ative use of this stuff indeed, and if they need a score, they could use a con­cer­to for pizzi­ca­to and ten instru­ments, Chopin’s “Noc­turne in E Flat Major,” or maybe “John­ny Get Your Gun.” Alter­na­tive­ly, they could part out the very first doc­u­men­tary and use the Pub­lic Domain Pro­jec­t’s bits and pieces of Dzi­ga Ver­tov’s Man With a Movie Cam­era. What­ev­er you want to cre­ate, the usable pub­lic domain can only grow more fruit­ful, so you might as well get mix­ing, remix­ing, and shar­ing, as Pond5 puts it, right away. Vis­it The Pub­lic Domain Project here.

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Mon­dri­an, Munch & Flem­ing Entered Pub­lic Domain in 2015 — But Welles, Achebe, and “Pur­ple Peo­ple Eater” Didn’t

Sher­lock Holmes Is Now in the Pub­lic Domain, Declares US Judge

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

A Cab­i­net of Curiosi­ties: Dis­cov­er The Pub­lic Domain Review’s New Book of Essays

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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